James Chuong
Analyst · William Blair. Your first question comes from Keith Weiss from Morgan Stanley
Yes, Keith, thanks for the question. So on the data center side, the Q3 revenue beat, as we mentioned, was primarily driven by recognizing greater-than-expected upfront term license revenue within that quarter. Since our announcement of the data center end of life back in September, we've had a couple of quarters now to really better understand some of the signals that we're seeing from our customers in terms of their buying behaviors, especially Q3 being the largest expiry base for us. So let me unpack that a little bit more for us here. So first, I would say that the migration to the cloud is on track and continues as expected. We're pleased with what we're seeing there. We still expect that to contribute mid- to high single digits on cloud growth. And second is that the retention rates on our data center business remain incredibly robust, in fact, actually outperformed expectations in the quarter. And third, for some of our largest customers with more complex migration, they remain committed to transitioning to the cloud. But it's going to be a multiyear journey for them, right? They've got a lot of deep customizations, change management. It's going to take these customers time, right? Often many of these have tens of thousands of users, some with over 100,000 users. So this category of customers, we saw a pull forward of purchasing and expansion activity into Q3 from future periods. And we also had a pricing change in March. That further catalyzed this dynamic. So as a result, that drove greater-than-expected upfront term license revenue recognized in the quarter. In fact, relative to our expectations for Q3, we recognized approximately $50 million more in upfront term license revenue. And that's some of the trends that we've been seeing since our announcement of end of life back in September, but more pronounced in Q3 given the size of the expiry base and the pricing catalysts that I mentioned. And maybe lastly, the cohort of DC customers that are actively planning and transitioning to the cloud, we're seeing these customers moderate their seat expansion. versus historical trends we've seen. Again, I'll mention that retention rate remains incredibly high, but now expecting a more muted level of data center expansion from these customers going forward as they try to move to the cloud. We're still seeing really nice uplift when customers move from DC to cloud. So net-net, what we're seeing is that our largest strategic customers continue to deepen their commitment at lasting, whether that's on DC or cloud, and we're working hard to meet them where they are and help them accelerate that transition so they can unlock all the AI and agent capabilities in the cloud. So hopefully that gives you a little bit of color there, Keith. And maybe I'll just share that with these dynamics sort of playing out across the year on data center, with Q4 yet to play out where revenue rec is being pulled into FY '26 from FY '27, we recognize that there's lumpiness in that pull-forward effect in data center and having the timing of -- and that does impact the timing of reported revenue RPO and CRPO. So internally, of course, we look at a variety of metrics to performance manage our business, including a really healthy ARR. So next week, we're going to be holding that investor forum at our Team '26 Conference and to help guide investors through the revenue recognition timing dynamics on the data center side. We'll look to enhance our disclosures and share historical subscription ARR, which will help normalize some of those timing effects and help everyone better understand the underlying strength of the overall business. So all up, we feel really good about our execution, the runway that we still have ahead of us. So more to share next week at the TEAM event and the investor forum.